About the ESP

Klaviyo positions itself as a data-driven marketing automation platform primarily targeting ecommerce businesses. Founded in 2012, it has grown significantly, especially after securing major funding rounds and establishing a deep integration with Shopify. What sets Klaviyo apart is its comprehensive approach to customer data and its event-based architecture that serves as the foundation for all platform features.

Unlike email-first ESPs that prioritize message deliverability and straightforward broadcasting capabilities, Klaviyo was built from the ground up with a focus on customer data and personalization. Their philosophy centers around unifying all customer interactions into a single data model, treating every touchpoint—from email opens to website visits to purchases—as events that feed into a cohesive customer profile. This data-first approach creates powerful capabilities but also introduces complexity that requires dedicated time to master.

Klaviyo has particularly strong appeal for mid-market ecommerce businesses with dedicated marketing teams that require sophisticated segmentation, personalization, and automation capabilities. The platform is designed for businesses that value extensive data analysis and are willing to invest significant time in learning a complex system rather than those seeking straightforward, reliable email delivery with high deliverability rates. For companies with the resources to leverage its capabilities, the platform enables marketers to create highly targeted campaigns based on customer behavior, purchase history, and predictive analytics.

Onboarding Process

Klaviyo’s onboarding experience is notably streamlined and tailored to your business type. The process begins with straightforward questions about how you’ll use the platform and which ecommerce platform you’re using. These choices actually impact the interface and available features, creating a customized experience from the outset.

The onboarding flow is divided into two distinct phases. The first phase collects information about your business and marketing needs through a series of targeted questions. The second phase focuses on technical setup, with particular emphasis on connecting your ecommerce platform—whether that’s Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, or others.

For WooCommerce users specifically, Klaviyo offers two installation paths: directly through the WooCommerce website or via the WordPress plugin directory. The WooCommerce website path adds some friction, requiring account creation and form completion, but both methods ultimately lead to the same outcome—a connected store that begins sending customer data to Klaviyo.

What stands out during onboarding is Klaviyo’s emphasis on historical data synchronization. The platform automatically pulls in your past orders and customer interactions, creating an immediate sense of value as your dashboard begins populating with real data from day one.

Ease of Use

Klaviyo sacrifices simplicity for power, creating a significant learning curve due to its data-centric approach. The interface is modern and well-organized, but the platform’s complexity means new users often require weeks of dedicated learning to become proficient. The introduction screens for each section help, but they can’t fully mitigate the inherent complexity of the system.

The platform’s event-based architecture creates substantial terminology hurdles—particularly the confusing distinction between “metrics” (event types) and “events” (individual instances). This conceptual model eventually provides flexibility for advanced users but creates frequent confusion even for experienced marketers who are new to the platform. Users must invest considerable time understanding these concepts before they can effectively use the system.

Klaviyo’s approach to progressive disclosure is well-intentioned but can overwhelm users as they dig deeper into functionality. The customizable dashboard views help mitigate this by allowing users to focus on specific metrics, but finding and configuring these views requires platform knowledge that newcomers lack.

For marketers transitioning from traditional ESPs, Klaviyo’s approach to segmentation and automation requires a fundamental mindset shift. While the platform provides documentation and contextual help, the learning process remains steep—requiring most organizations to dedicate specific team members to mastering the platform rather than enabling everyone to use it effectively from the start.

Broadcast Feature

Klaviyo refers to broadcast emails as “campaigns,” and while the creation process offers powerful capabilities, it also demonstrates the platform’s preference for automation over reliable, straightforward email delivery. The campaign builder leads users through multiple steps: selecting recipients, creating content, setting sending options, and reviewing before launch—a process that emphasizes targeting precision over speed of execution and deliverability focus.

The segmentation capabilities within the campaign builder showcase Klaviyo’s data-driven approach but can make simple broadcasts feel unnecessarily complex. Users can target audiences based on virtually any combination of profile attributes, past behaviors, or custom properties—powerful for sophisticated marketers but potentially overwhelming for those who simply want to send a newsletter to their full list with high inbox placement rates.

Content creation offers both drag-and-drop and HTML options. The editor supports dynamic content based on customer data, but implementing these personalization features requires a thorough understanding of Klaviyo’s data model. Marketers comfortable with basic broadcasts may find themselves struggling to implement the personalization capabilities that justify Klaviyo’s premium pricing, when what they really need is reliable delivery of well-crafted messages.

A/B testing is comprehensive but not intuitive, allowing for testing subject lines, content, sending times, and sender information. While the platform provides statistical analysis of results, understanding and acting on this data requires analytical skills that not all marketing teams possess.

For businesses that primarily rely on broadcast emails rather than complex automation, and who value deliverability and straightforward campaign creation over data integration, Klaviyo’s campaign tools may feel overengineered and unnecessarily complex for day-to-day broadcast needs.

Autoresponder/Automation Feature

Klaviyo refers to automations as “flows,” and this is where the platform truly shines. The flow builder is a visual, drag-and-drop environment that allows marketers to create sophisticated customer journeys triggered by events, list memberships, or segments.

The flow builder’s strength comes from Klaviyo’s event architecture. Any tracked event—from email clicks to website visits to purchase completions—can serve as a trigger or conditional split within a flow. This creates virtually unlimited possibilities for personalized customer journeys.

Particularly impressive is the flow builder’s handling of ecommerce-specific scenarios. Pre-built templates (“ideas”) include abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase follow-ups, winback campaigns, and product replenishment reminders. These templates aren’t just starting points—they’re sophisticated flows with conditional logic already in place.

Flows can incorporate multiple channels (email, SMS, etc.) and include time delays, conditional splits based on behavior, personalized content, and splits based on predictive analytics like customer lifetime value. The conditional logic capabilities are especially powerful, allowing for complex scenarios like “send this message only if the customer viewed but didn’t purchase from category X in the last 30 days.”

The platform also provides comprehensive analytics for flows, showing performance at both the overall flow level and for individual messages within the flow. This makes optimization straightforward, with clear visibility into where customers advance or exit the journey.

Templates

Klaviyo offers a substantial library of email templates designed specifically for ecommerce use cases. The templates are modern, mobile-responsive, and categorized by industry and purpose, making it easy to find relevant starting points.

The template designs reflect current ecommerce email best practices, with strong visual hierarchy, prominent call-to-action buttons, and layouts that work well across devices. They’re particularly well-suited for product showcases, with effective spacing and formatting for product grids.

Beyond static templates, Klaviyo also provides “ideas” (template flows) for automation. These comprehensive templates include not just the email designs but also the trigger logic, sending schedules, and conditional paths—essentially providing complete marketing programs that can be quickly customized.

Klaviyo’s template system is enhanced by its dynamic content capabilities. Templates can include product recommendation blocks, countdown timers, dynamic image swaps based on customer attributes, and other personalization elements that pull from the customer data platform.

While the template library is extensive, Klaviyo also makes it easy to import custom HTML templates or create designs from scratch using the drag-and-drop editor.

Email Template Editor

Klaviyo offers two primary ways to create emails: a visual drag-and-drop editor and an HTML editor for those who prefer to work with code.

The drag-and-drop editor provides a clean, intuitive interface with a wide range of content blocks including text, images, buttons, dividers, spacers, product blocks, and dynamic content. The editor includes robust styling options while maintaining guardrails that help ensure emails remain responsive and deliverable.

What sets Klaviyo’s editor apart is its seamless integration with the platform’s data capabilities. When editing any text element, users can easily insert personalization tags, dynamic content blocks, and conditional content rules that change what’s displayed based on subscriber attributes. This tight integration between content creation and data makes sophisticated personalization straightforward.

The HTML editor offers direct code access with syntax highlighting and a preview mode. It’s well-suited for advanced users who want complete control over email rendering. The platform also provides a hybrid approach where users can build with the drag-and-drop editor and then fine-tune with HTML when needed.

Both editors include mobile preview capabilities, allowing users to see how emails will render on different devices. The platform also provides spam testing features to identify potential deliverability issues before sending.

List Management

Klaviyo’s approach to list management reflects its data-first philosophy. Rather than treating lists as the primary organizational structure, Klaviyo centers around individual customer profiles that can belong to multiple lists and segments.

The platform distinguishes between lists (explicit groups created through signup forms or imports) and segments (dynamic groups based on behavior or attributes). This dual approach provides flexibility while maintaining clean organization.

Profile management is comprehensive, with each customer profile containing:

  • Contact information and consent status
  • Custom fields and attributes
  • Complete interaction history across all channels
  • Basic engagement metrics
  • Segment memberships
  • Campaign and flow engagement

It’s important to note that advanced predictive analytics like churn risk and lifetime value calculations require purchasing Klaviyo’s separate Marketing Analytics add-on, which starts at an additional $100/month beyond the base subscription cost.

Klaviyo’s segmentation capabilities are extensive but complex to master. Segments can be created based on combinations of profile attributes, behavioral data, and custom properties. The segment builder supports both simple and complex logic, including nested conditions and AND/OR operators, but requires significant time to learn effectively.

What distinguishes Klaviyo’s list management is how it leverages the event architecture. Any event tracked in the system—from email clicks to website visits to purchases—can be used as segmentation criteria. This creates precise targeting potential, allowing marketers to reach specific audiences with each message, but requires deep platform knowledge to utilize effectively.

The platform also provides list cleaning tools, including automatic suppression management, bounce handling, and engagement tracking to help maintain deliverability rates.

Analytics

Klaviyo’s analytics capabilities are comprehensive but complex, leveraging the platform’s event-based architecture to track touchpoints across channels. This complexity creates a steep learning curve for utilizing the data effectively.

The analytics dashboard is customizable, allowing users to create personalized views with various metrics. These “cards” can display different data points, from traditional email metrics to ecommerce analytics. However, creating and interpreting these custom reports requires significant platform knowledge and analytical skills.

Standard email metrics (opens, clicks, unsubscribes) are available but presented within Klaviyo’s complex data model, sometimes making it difficult to quickly access straightforward campaign performance data that other platforms present more directly.

Where Klaviyo attempts to differentiate is in connecting marketing activities to business outcomes. The platform provides attribution reporting to show how email campaigns and flows contribute to revenue, including:

  • Revenue per recipient
  • Revenue per email
  • Attributed conversion value
  • Product-level purchase analysis

However, it’s critical to note that the most valuable analytics features—including customer lifetime value calculations, advanced cohort analysis, and predictive purchase behavior—require purchasing Klaviyo’s separate Marketing Analytics add-on, which starts at an additional $100/month beyond the base subscription cost. This significant additional expense puts these advanced features out of reach for many businesses.

For ecommerce businesses, Klaviyo offers reports including:

  • Product performance analytics
  • Purchase frequency metrics
  • Geographic sales distribution

The reporting interface enables segmenting any report by various dimensions and adjusting date ranges for trend analysis, but the complexity of creating and interpreting these reports often requires dedicated analytical expertise that smaller marketing teams may lack.

Support

Klaviyo’s support model reflects its positioning as a premium platform with a tiered service approach that reserves faster response times and more personalized assistance for higher-spending accounts. The standard support included with all paid plans includes email support and basic live chat, but response times vary dramatically based on your support tier.

For standard paid accounts, email response times range from 4 hours for urgent issues to 48 hours for low-priority concerns. LiveChat is available on weekdays only (24/5) with no weekend coverage. While this baseline support is adequate for routine questions, businesses experiencing critical deliverability issues or urgent technical problems may find the response times frustrating.

Klaviyo offers two premium support tiers—Professional and Enterprise—but provides no transparent pricing or qualification criteria on their website, requiring potential customers to “talk to sales” to learn more. This lack of transparency makes it difficult for businesses to budget for appropriate support or understand what level of service they can expect.

The Professional support tier improves email response times (2 hours for urgent issues) and adds weekend LiveChat during local business hours, plus a single annual training session. Deliverability strategist access is technically available “upon request,” but without clear guidelines on what qualifies a request or how quickly it might be fulfilled.

Only at the Enterprise support level do customers receive truly premium support with 1-hour response times for urgent issues, 24/7 LiveChat coverage, regular access to deliverability strategists, and proactive deliverability monitoring. These deliverability services—critical for email marketing success—are effectively gated behind what is likely a substantial additional investment beyond the already premium platform cost.

This tiered approach stands in stark contrast to email-first platforms like Emercury, which includes services such as onboarding consultation, live account setup, dedicated customer success managers, and delivery analysts as standard features in their mid-tier plans. For instance, Emercury’s Pro plan ($825/month for 150,000 contacts) includes phone support, Skype chat support, a delivery analyst, dedicated IPs, and monthly one-on-one training sessions without requiring separate premium support packages.

For businesses without enterprise-level budgets, Klaviyo’s approach to support means you’ll largely rely on self-service resources—their knowledge base, community forums, and video tutorials. While these resources are comprehensive, they can’t replace the strategic guidance and rapid intervention that dedicated support teams provide, especially when facing deliverability challenges that directly impact campaign performance and ROI.

Pricing

Klaviyo’s pricing structure is primarily based on the number of contacts in your database, with unlimited email sends. While this approach differs from some competitors that charge based on email volume, it creates significant cost challenges for businesses with large contact lists who send emails infrequently.

The pricing scales steeply as your subscriber count grows, making Klaviyo one of the more expensive ESPs on the market. Current pricing tiers include:

  • 10,000 contacts: $175/month
  • 25,000 contacts: $425/month
  • 50,000 contacts: $790/month
  • 100,000 contacts: $1,440/month

What’s crucial to understand is that Klaviyo’s multi-channel approach significantly multiplies costs. SMS functionality is priced separately based on message volume, with packages of SMS credits available for purchase at substantial additional cost. For businesses utilizing both email and SMS, this can effectively double your monthly expenditure.

The cost multiplication becomes even more dramatic when you add the Marketing Analytics add-on, which scales with your contact count just like the base subscription:

  • 10,000 contacts: +$100/month
  • 25,000 contacts: +$128/month
  • 50,000 contacts: +$237/month
  • 100,000 contacts: +$432/month

This add-on is required for access to advanced features like customer lifetime value analysis and predictive analytics.

This compounding cost structure means that a business with 50,000 contacts using email, SMS, and analytics features could easily spend over $1,000/month ($790 base + $237 analytics + SMS costs), compared to a fraction of that amount on an email-focused platform that includes core features in its base pricing. For businesses with 100,000+ contacts utilizing all three components, monthly costs can exceed $2,000 before even considering premium support tiers.

While Klaviyo markets itself as not engaging in feature-gating within its email platform, the reality is that its base price point is already set at a premium level, and crucial functionality is spread across multiple paid add-ons that all scale with list size. This means businesses pay for advanced capabilities whether they use them or not, potentially making it cost-inefficient for companies with simpler needs.

The platform offers a free tier for up to 250 contacts and 500 email sends, but these limitations are so restrictive that they’re primarily useful for testing rather than actual marketing operations. Most businesses will quickly exceed these limits and face significant price jumps.

For ecommerce businesses that fully leverage Klaviyo’s advanced features, have high-value products with strong margins, and utilize all channels effectively, the pricing may be justified by ROI. However, businesses with lower-margin products, larger contact lists, or more basic email marketing needs will likely find Klaviyo’s pricing structure prohibitively expensive compared to more cost-effective alternatives that focus on delivering excellent email performance without the added cost of features they may never use.

Pros

Unified Customer Data Platform

Klaviyo centralizes customer data in one place, creating comprehensive profiles that can power marketing activities. This event-based architecture enables advanced personalization and targeting based on customer interactions, though mastering this system requires significant investment.

Ecommerce Integration

The platform integrates with major ecommerce platforms (particularly Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento), enabling synchronization of product data, order history, and customer information without requiring extensive technical support.

Advanced Automation Capabilities

Klaviyo’s flow builder provides flexibility for creating complex, multi-step customer journeys triggered by tracked events and incorporating conditional logic. These capabilities benefit businesses with sophisticated marketing needs and the resources to implement them.

Detailed Segmentation

The platform’s approach to segments allows for targeting based on combinations of customer attributes, behaviors, and custom properties, creating precision in audience selection for businesses with the expertise to utilize these features effectively.

Revenue Attribution

Klaviyo provides visibility into how marketing activities drive revenue, with attribution reporting that helps businesses understand the ROI of their email and SMS programs. However, the most valuable analytics features require an additional paid add-on.

Cons

Steep Learning Curve

Klaviyo’s data-centric approach and confusing terminology create a significantly steeper learning curve than email-first ESPs. Many businesses report taking weeks or months to become proficient, often requiring dedicated staff just to manage the platform effectively.

Premium Multi-Tiered Pricing

The platform’s base pricing is substantially higher than email-focused marketing tools, but the real cost shock comes from its multi-tiered pricing structure. Email, SMS, and Analytics are all priced separately, with both the base subscription and add-ons scaling with contact count. This can potentially multiply costs by 3-4x for businesses that want the complete solution, making Klaviyo extraordinarily expensive for businesses with large lists or multi-channel needs.

Hidden Support Costs

Critical services like deliverability strategists and priority support require additional investment in premium support tiers with non-transparent pricing. Unlike email-focused platforms that include deliverability expertise in standard plans, Klaviyo reserves these essential services for Enterprise-level support customers.

Complex for Broadcast-Focused Marketers

For businesses that primarily rely on broadcast emails rather than complex automation, Klaviyo’s tools can feel unnecessarily complicated and overengineered. The platform clearly prioritizes data integration over making broadcast campaigns simple and efficient.

Less Focus on Deliverability

While Klaviyo offers deliverability tools, these are primarily reserved for premium support tiers. The standard platform doesn’t emphasize deliverability optimization with the same intensity as email-first platforms that treat inbox placement as their core competency across all plan levels.

Confusing Metric vs. Event Terminology

The platform’s terminology around “metrics” (event types) and “events” (individual instances) is persistently confusing even for experienced users, creating ongoing friction in daily use.

Limited Custom Event Creation in UI

Creating custom event types requires using the API rather than the user interface, making this powerful feature inaccessible to non-technical users who can’t write code or don’t have developer resources.

Tiered Support with Slow Response Times

Standard support response times can reach up to 48 hours for low-priority issues, with limited weekend coverage. This contrasts starkly with email-first platforms that typically provide faster, more personalized support regardless of plan level.

Resource-Intensive

Fully leveraging Klaviyo requires significant team resources, making it difficult for businesses without dedicated marketing staff to achieve positive ROI despite the high costs.

Limited Broadcast Innovation

The platform’s focus on automation means broadcast features receive less development attention, potentially frustrating marketers who still rely heavily on manual campaigns and value ongoing innovation in core email functionality.

Final words

Klaviyo represents a significant evolution in marketing platforms, moving beyond straightforward email delivery to create a comprehensive customer data and marketing automation system across multiple channels. Its event-based architecture provides flexibility and power for businesses willing to invest in its complexity, but this comes at the cost of simplicity, direct focus on email deliverability, and substantial financial investment across multiple add-on services.

What distinguishes Klaviyo is its thoroughly data-driven approach to marketing. Every aspect of the platform is built around customer data integration, creating opportunities for sophisticated personalization that traditional email-first ESPs don’t prioritize. However, this data-centricity comes with significant complexity and shifts focus away from the core email delivery capabilities that drive immediate results for many businesses.

Potential customers should be fully aware that Klaviyo’s multi-channel approach can dramatically multiply costs. The base email platform is already premium-priced (ranging from $175/month for 10,000 contacts to $1,440/month for 100,000 contacts), but when you add separate charges for SMS functionality and the Marketing Analytics add-on (which adds $100-$432/month depending on list size), businesses can easily end up paying more than double what they might spend on an email-focused platform that includes core features in a single, straightforward pricing structure. For businesses with 100,000+ contacts utilizing all three components, monthly costs can easily exceed $2,000 before even factoring in premium support tiers.

The platform is best suited for mid-market to enterprise ecommerce businesses with dedicated marketing teams, substantial technical resources, healthy margins that justify the premium pricing across multiple add-ons, and a genuine need for multi-channel marketing. These organizations can leverage Klaviyo’s advanced capabilities to drive revenue growth that offsets the substantial costs. For businesses that primarily value reliable email delivery, straightforward broadcast capabilities, and focused innovation on core email functionality without the financial burden of paying for unused channels, email-first platforms that prioritize deliverability and direct human support will likely provide better value and results.

While Klaviyo offers powerful capabilities, businesses should realistically assess whether they need a complex multi-channel data platform or simply an effective email marketing solution. Organizations that focus primarily on direct communication through well-crafted broadcasts may find better value in platforms that specialize in email delivery rather than trying to be an all-in-one marketing solution with separately priced components that all scale with list size. These email-first platforms typically offer more accessible interfaces, more affordable pricing models (especially for larger lists), and support teams focused specifically on maximizing email performance.

For the right business—one with substantial marketing budgets, technical resources, data expertise, and a need for sophisticated automation across multiple channels—Klaviyo provides a powerful marketing engine. But for many others, particularly those focused on effective email communication rather than complex data analysis across multiple paid channels, specialized email platforms that prioritize deliverability, broadcast innovation, and human support represent a better alignment with their actual needs, capabilities, and budget constraints.

About the ESP

Emercury positions itself as a mid-sized ESP that caters primarily to email marketing veterans and businesses focused on ROI. What makes them interesting is their philosophy of prioritizing core features and deliverability over flashy additions. While they’re not as well-known as some of the bigger names in the space, they’ve carved out a niche by focusing on what they believe actually drives results in email marketing.

The platform stands out for its approach to features and pricing. Rather than using feature-gating as a pricing strategy (common among larger ESPs), they make most features available across all plans. Their development philosophy centers on proven, ROI-driving capabilities rather than chasing every new industry trend. This makes them particularly appealing to experienced email marketers who value substance over novelty.

This review will explore how this philosophy plays out across their various features and capabilities, from their streamlined interface to their emphasis on human-based support.

Onboarding Process

Emercury has a pretty streamlined onboarding process that ensures you get started on the right foot. The moment that you sign up, you’re guided to setting up your sender profile and the support team is there to help you. You get access to an actual live support team to guide you if you get stuck at any point.

Ease of Use

This is probably the leading advantage when it comes to Emercury. As per their stated philosophy, their platform is designed to focus on the core features that make a difference. That isn’t to say that they don’t also have a lot of additional cool features.

However, the design seems to be entirely focused around the fundamentals. You will never feel overwhelmed, and there is next to no learning curve. Whether you’re a newbie trying to send your first campaign, or an advanced email veteran, you are sure to craft your first campaigns in minutes.

Broadcast Feature

If you care about broadcasts, then Emercury might just be right up your alley. With the ever increasing focus on “automation”, many ESPs have stopped innovating when it comes to broadcasts. Emercury is different because at their core they believe that broadcasts are just as important as automation. Something you can learn more about in this mailcon article here.

With that said, the main thing we love about the broadcast panel in Emercury is how it prioritizes the main features that you need. You can choose to either create a regular campaign, an A/B split campaign. To the side you have your folders which allows you to easily organize your drafts and templates, and then you have the list of all campaigns.

The really fun stuff begins once you enter into the campaign creation process 

Emercury decided to go with a wizard whereby you can easily create a campaign and get access to all the features and options you need, without getting overwhelmed. This is accomplished by first splitting the process into 4 steps.

But even then, within the different steps the most important features are put front and center, whereas the more advanced features are unveiled as you need them.

The first step involves creating the actual email (using the editor of your choice), and it includes everything you might expect, and then some more. Aside from allowing you to easily design the email and handle the copy, it also allows you to tweak personalization to your liking.

Aside from the basic merge tags that let you drop in bits of personal data (like first name, city, or custom field values), it also allows you to leverage “Smart Personalization”.

This is a pretty cool feature where you can literally have entire parts of the email look or show differently based on who’s viewing the email. That is to say you can set certain conditions, and based on which conditions the viewer meets, they will see different content.

In the second step is where you get to see the really cool extra features that broadcasters will love.

At first glance it seems simple because you just define the basics such as the subject line, and preheader text, however, it also provides a ton of extra features. All you have to do is click on the “Edit Advanced Options” button and see a plethora of extra features.

This includes enabling an automatic delivery reminder or permission reminder. These remind the subscriber either how they got on your list and/or that they need to add you to their address book, as a way of boosting deliverability.

Next, you will see a super useful feature that automatically adds anyone who opens the campaign to a specific list. An option to add google analytics tracking to the links inside of the email, an option that generates ECPM/CPA tracking code so you can see the ROI for each campaign. And finally, an ability to set the delivery stop time.

Aside from this it allows you to customize the footer if you want to for this specific campaign, as well as decide if this campaign will be public (shown on publisher’s site).

The third screen is where you get to leverage the power of your segments

It is a simple panel where you choose which list or segment you want to send the campaign to. And then, you also get to select suppression lists (contacts to be excluded from this campaign).

But the really cool feature is something that they call “virtual segments”. It is a special segment that is created for that specific campaign, and won’t show up in your “lists” panel. This is used mostly for the purpose of throttling a campaign and making sure that it sends in multiple steps. That is to say, it makes it so that not everyone gets the campaign at the same time.

This is a feature that is essential for those with bigger lists and serious email marketers who care about deliverability.

And finally, overview and content scoring

The final step is an overview of how your campaign is set up, and it has shortcuts to the main actions you might need. This includes the preview feature, if you want to take another look at the email without going backwards. It has the option to schedule a delivery, schedule a test send, or even send the campaign immediately, if you’re especially confident.

Autoresponder/Automation Feature

The automation feature is probably the best example about how Emercury tries to make things feel simple, and yet still offer a lot of power. Instead of overwhelming you with a ton of different modules, you’re presented with some really straightforward fundamental blocks.

This means that you can recreate a basic autoresponder in literally seconds from the moment you open the journey builder for the first time. However, at the same time it still offers some powerful features when you want to get fancier, you just need to enable them.

Some of our favorite modules include the “if” block which lets you define all sorts of cool logic about how the automation should flow. Including day and time targeting, as well the webhook module which allows you to to trigger actions in any external system.

However, the module that really stands out is the “Go to” module which we think hasn’t been seen on other platforms yet, at least not to our knowledge. It’s this really cool module where you can have the automation go to any previous step.

This is useful if for example someone has been sent an entire sequence, but hasn’t bought yet. You can simply insert a go-to step that takes buyers through the flow once again.

Templates

Emercury offers a growing library of templates. It’s not a huge library by any means, but it offers everything you need with classic, elegant, responsive templates that are a good choice for any brand. If you want to go super custom and match your brand exactly, they offer custom services where their team of designers can custom-design templates to match your brand.

Email Template Editor

Email Template Editor Options

✅ HTML WYSIWYG

✅ Drag and Drop

The drag and drop editor is another example of how Emercury balances power with simplicity. As you might expect, it gives you all the standard drag-and-drop functionality for building your emails visually. However, what makes it interesting is how it integrates with Emercury’s personalization features.

When you’re working with any text content in the editor, you get access to both basic merge tags and the Smart Personalization feature mentioned earlier. This means you can select any text block and either drop in basic subscriber data (like names or custom field values), or set up those conditional content rules we talked about in the broadcast section.

This is a good example of Emercury’s focus on ROI-driving features. Instead of overwhelming you with dozens of fancy-sounding options, they’ve focused on making it easy to do the things that actually impact your bottom line – like personalizing your content to different subscriber segments.

The integration is particularly well thought out. You won’t find yourself hunting through complex menus to find the personalization options. They’re right there when you’re editing text, which makes it practical to use these features in your day-to-day email creation process, rather than treating them as a special occasion thing.

List Management

Sending emails is only one half of the coin. If you have low quality list management, then no amount of sending features will help you. Fortunately the people behind Emercury seem to share that notion, as can be witnessed by their attention to list management features.

Adding contacts

When it comes to adding contacts, aside from the basics such as letting you build forms, integrations, and adding contacts manually, they also support an incoming webhooks feature not common on most platforms. With this you can essentially make it so that you can feed new data to your Emercury account, in real time, coming from other platforms.

In addition, they feature a full contact profile where you can at a glance see the assigned tags and all custom field values, as well as the “Message Center”, which displays the full messaging history with this contact.

Segmentation

Emercury seems to support every single way that you can imagine of organizing, segmenting and managing your contacts. It all seems to start with lists, which are the basic organizational unit for contacts. Each contact must belong to a list.

From there on you have multiple ways to differentiate contacts in even more granular ways, including via tags, smart segments, custom profile values and events.

As you might and should expect, when you send out a broadcast campaign you can choose one or multiple lists (or segments).

If you want to get super granular, you can use the advanced segment builder and create a segment based on any possible combination of tags, conditions, actions, events that you can imagine. And then when you do broadcast, proceed to choose any combination of segments or lists.

Of course, if you’re utilizing the automation builder, you can trigger a journey any time a lead enters a given segment or list. And even create “broadcasted journeys” which are something like a hybrid between a broadcast and an automated journey. They call this feature “Scheduled Automations for Existing Lists”.

Analytics

Emercury claims that its analytics and reporting features are one of the main reasons why a lot of email veterans are moving to their platform. If you’re overwhelmed with the reporting and analytics on other platforms, then Emercury might just be right for you.

It displays all the metrics you need in a simple and straightforward way which is simple to interpret at a glance. This makes it fun and easy to go and look at your reports each time you’re trying something new in your marketing. And that is how you grow and improve as a marketer. If this ease of use sounds good, then it might be right for you.

Support

One of the advantages of working with a medium-sized ESP is that you still get to deal with humans, and we see that advantage clearly displayed here. Whenever you reach out to support you will notice that there are no support chat bots, ready-made (copy-pasted) answers and runarounds that make no sense.

You’re dealing with actual humans who are inside the company and working right alongside the key players. As opposed to an outsourced support team following canned scripts, as you would with a larger more corporate ESP.

Pricing

The pricing is really interesting here, because it highlights the difference between those “in the know” and beginners who chase after flashy featurettes. If you look at the actual price per email sent, Emercury is far more affordable than those big platforms.

According to Emercury, their philosophy is that you pay for sending emails, not for features (unlike most other platforms). Their philosophy states that features should be available to everyone, and not use features as a pricing metric.

When they develop a feature, they try to make it available to all tiers. The only exception is if the feature is genuinely computationally expensive, in which case it differs from one plan to the next. Otherwise though, pricing is not related to features.

Now, if you’re experienced with email, you will know that most of your profit comes from using the staple foundational features and that deliverability impacts your profits far more than any fancy side-featurette. If you’re this person, Emercury pricing will appeal to you as you will get to make more profits, while spending less per email sent.

Pros

Feature development that focuses on ROI

If you read through the Emercury blog, you’ll notice a pattern. Their CEO is adamant about making it clear that their philosophy is that they give you what you need to make money off of email marketing.

This means that their approach is entirely different to platforms that try to lure you in with cool-sounding features that you’re either not going to use, or don’t make much of a difference.

Emercury states that they primarily cater to and serve the needs of email veterans, and all feature development is driven towards what their expert users need to boost ROI on email.

This isn’t to say that they don’t also add all kinds of fun and quality-of-life features, merely that their focus is heavily biased toward results, not what sounds cool on paper.

Simplicity of use versus overwhelm

One thing that you will notice is how “simple” Emercury seems when you first use it. This seems to flow directly from their philosophy of prioritizing the money-making features, as this is what they put front and center.

The interface is almost like a guide that gets you to focus on what matters in email marketing, making sure that you don’t get lost in overwhelm. Now, this isn’t to say that they don’t also have a lot of the extra features. Their interface is just designed in such a way that they are de-emphasized or enabled on a per-need basis.

If you ever feel overwhelmed trying other email marketing platforms, you might just want to try Emercury and see if your opinion changes. When everything is in front of you all at the same time, it can feel like an impossible task to master email marketing. However, when you realize that most of your results come from getting a few basics right, email marketing can become quite a bit easier.

A focus on human-based support

If you’ve used other SaaS offerings (email marketing or otherwise), you might be used to customer support that is frustrating. You might be used to obvious canned responses (even when you do reach an actual human), and conversations that go in circles. This is because most platforms outsource their customer service.

Emercury has an in-house customer service where you talk to members of the core team. That is to say they are intimately familiar with the product and how it works, as opposed to merely random people trained how to answer questions.

Fair pricing, not using features as blackmail

Another thing that the CEO of Emercury seems to emphasize quite often is their philosophy that features should be available to all. This is in contrast to many of the larger email marketing names that use “feature lock” as a way to get you to upgrade.

It’s typical with many of the services that we review to see a situation where you only need one small feature, but you have to upgrade to a higher tier that includes a volume of email you don’t actually need.

Emercury on the other hand bases its pricing on the number of emails sent, not number of features included. Almost every feature is included in every plan, and you only pay more in order to send more emails.

Cons

Less of the smaller or more experimental features

If you’ve grown accustomed to one of the smaller exotic features on a different platform, you might find that it doesn’t exist on Emercury. This is both good news and bad news, depending on how you view it. They seem intent on developing proven features that really move the needle, and don’t rush smaller and unproven features.

It’s good in the sense that it might help you focus on what actually gives results. It might be bad if you find that you have a habit of using one of these smaller features. We recommend giving it a test and finding out.

Final words

Emercury presents itself as a focused, deliverability-oriented ESP that prioritizes core features and ROI over flashy additions. Its streamlined interface, fair pricing model, and emphasis on human support make it particularly appealing to email marketing veterans who value substance over novelty. While it may not offer every experimental feature found on larger platforms, this intentional restraint appears to be a strategic choice rather than a limitation.

For businesses seeking an ESP that emphasizes what actually drives results in email marketing – deliverability, usable analytics, and core functionality – Emercury offers a compelling option. The platform’s philosophy of making features available across all tiers, coupled with its focus on human-based support, creates a refreshing alternative to the feature-gating common in the industry.

Whether Emercury is right for you ultimately depends on your priorities. If you value straightforward functionality, strong deliverability, and direct access to knowledgeable support over having every possible feature, it’s worth serious consideration. The platform seems particularly well-suited for experienced email marketers who want to focus on what drives actual results rather than getting lost in feature complexity.